“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”

~ Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum LP

The temptation to isolate is so strong—to rely only on myself, always.

To never be disappointed or hurt again. To only need one heart—this heart. To never need the warmth, touch or unconditional understanding of another human being because human beings are flawed…we lie, we cheat, we betray, we go deaf to what we can’t handle hearing, turn a blind eye to what we can’t handle seeing.

When will we get it? When will we realize the only constraints holding us back from one another are the invisible laws and lines we’ve created, all in the name of society? How can we limit love, limit our spirits, our souls—how can we put a ceiling on how high we can fly, how deeply we can dive in? We become so embroiled in the rules, in the constructs, that we forget to listen to what our hearts tell us, what the signs and synchronicities are showing us, what our guides are screaming at us.

The hardest thing I’ve found through life is to bypass my head and listen to my heart. To quiet my head long enough for the messages in my heart to reach every cell in my body, the time at which the mind is just overwhelmed by the heart and has no choice but to give in. To release the ego, the assumptions, the perceptions long enough to see things as they really are—to not let experience or traumas or even joys get in the way of feeling what’s really happening rather than merely seeing it.

The transition we’re going through as a planet is so strongly focused on moving away from the ego and truly transcending what’s good for the individual in favor of what’s good for all of us. Our survival depends on it; everything’s connected. And when we release the ego, we realize that what’s best for the individual and the whole is the same thing.

We all need and want the same basic things, and only through the process of letting go and releasing all our past accumulations of egocentric debris can we truly come back to each other—connect. We can become one again and ascend everything we’ve come to know and understand up until this point…because there’s so much more to know than we may ever realize, and we won’t realize it until we’re able to lift the veil and see what’s been shining before us all along.

Shine on.

We shine through our hearts, the throne room of our soul. Our shine, our energy, is completely unique to our spirit. We are all completely unique, completely individual, completely ourselves. And it is through that uniqueness, that individuality, that we are all connected. Fighte Fuaight: “woven into and through each other.”

There is no beginning and there is no end, but simply one continued spiral, one circle, constantly feeding into itself—the Ouroboros. Constant birth, death and rebirth all make up the never-ending cycle of life. We shed our skins to grow new layers, ripe with the simultaneous innocence of a child and the ancient histories of our past journeys written on our hearts.

I read a great quote recently alluding to the idea that service to mankind is the rent we pay to tread upon this beautiful planet. Nothing we do alone could ever deliver the same impact as those acts that we can share and carry through with others. Even when we think we’re creating alone, like I am right now, we’re not, because every experience I’ve lived, every human being that I’ve met up until this point, has influenced this piece.

About Jillian Locke

Jillian Locke is a writer, explorer and obsessive risk-taker. She's here to shake things up, shake things out, move up and move on. She's a lover of nature - no, she IS nature - and someday, she will actually become one with the mountains...and then the stars. Today, she finds herself striving for balance through adventure, radical change and living her life authentically and to the fullest, maybe for the first time. Follow her at radiantdevotion.wordpress.com and find her on Facebook.

Noooooooooooooooooooo nonononono! THANK YOU! You just turned a light on for me that I sorely needed tonight, when all I'm contemplating is isolation, which is the exact reason I came back to this article and found this comment.